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Thursday, March 20, 2014

21 Billion Global Trades

We’re almost a quarter of the way through 2014, and the folks at the FIA (Futures Industry Association) have finished crunching the numbers on just how many trades there were across all derivative exchanges last year in releasing its annual survey, and the numbers – as always – are eye-popping; with over 21 BILLION futures and options trades done last year across the globe.

That’s up a slight 2.1% after a decline of 15% in 2012, and nearly four times higher than 10 years ago – but still well below the record number of futures and options contracts traded back in 2011:

“According to statistics gathered by FIA from 84 exchanges worldwide, 21.64 billion futures and options contracts were traded in 2013, an increase of 2.1% from the previous year, but still well below the number of contracts traded in 2012 and 2011.”

Now here’s where things get tricky for those of us dealing with exchange traded futures and options on futures in the US; as a huge portion of this overall volume comes from stock options. When you pull those out of the equation, and look at just the trades us futures folks are involved in day in and day out – we can see futures trading was actually up 10%, while Options Trading was down -6.8%.

10% more futures trades might not seem like all that much, until you see that’s 1.2 Billion more contracts traded in 2013 – somebody somewhere in the clearing business had a good year! Where’s it coming from? Asian trading as a whole was down, but Asian stock indices was anything but.

“One of the more interesting trends of the year was the surge in the volume of equity derivatives based on Asian stock indices. For example, greater investor interest in the Japanese stock market led to much heavier trading in futures and options based on the Nikkei 225, the leading index of Japanese stocks.

At the Osaka Securities Exchange, trading in the regular size Nikkei 225 futures and the mini Nikkei 225 futures rose 58.3% and 79.3% to 30.91 million and 233.86 million contracts. At the Singapore Exchange, Nikkei 225 futures rose 39.6% to 39.09 million contracts. At the CME, the yen-dominated Nikkei 225 jumped 105.1% to 11.79 million and the dollar-denominated Nikkei 225 futures jumped 176.9% to 4.68 million contracts.”

Now, we’ve discussed multiple times what exchange (CME vs ICE) holds dominance over each other (here, here, & here), and the CME was able to hold the number one position in contracts traded, despite the ICE’s international push to take over global exchanges, as well as the battle over which Oil contract gets traded more, WTI or Brent.

What’s it all mean… well, for one – that the CME should reconsider the removal of the trader waiver for data fees (you guys seem to be doing alright, leave the small retail trader alone). But the overall take is that futures markets remain one of the most voluminous trading markets there is – providing that all too important ingredient for the professional who play their trade on the futures markets – liquidity